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Excerpted from Boo Hoo: A Dot Com Story by Ernst Malmsten. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
'Why don't you try the shiromi usuzukuri? It's whitefish, with a little something extra.' Robin Leigh, manager of London's Nobu restaurant and partner at the fashionable new restaurant in New York called Bond St, was doing his best. But I wasn't the easiest customer he'd ever had.
'I don't like fish much,' I said. 'Do you have any meat?'
Robin thought for a second. 'Why don't you let me choose something . . . OK? . . . Great. I won't let you down.'
It was around 9.30 p.m. on a sultry evening in June and Nobu was buzzing with its usual mix of old money, celebrities and glamorous young things. I noticed Elle Macpherson sitting at one of the best tables by the window, studiously avoiding my gaze.
Michael Skidmore, an old friend of Robin, had used this connection to get our table. With us were Paul Kanareck and Lauren Goldstein, the fashion writer for Fortune magazine.
Looking around the restaurant with approval, she said, 'This is certainly a cool place. Ten out of ten.'
boo had been chosen for Fortune's list of the 12 Cool Companies of 1999, and Lauren had come over to London to spend a day in the office and meet a few key staff. I'd been too busy to see her, but promised to sit down for a full interview the next day before she headed back home. I'd invited her to dinner this evening so that we could get to know each other on a more informal level.
So far, everyone seemed to be getting along really well. Skidmore told Lauren about our plans to sell fashion brands like Paul Smith, Prada Sport and Issey Miyake. The conversation then somehow turned to Royal Elastics and their amazing laceless sneaker, which Skidmore was planning to order for boo after his success with it at Barneys.
'Who could have predicted that one of our bestselling shoes would be made by a small Australian start-up?' said Skidmore. 'I guess that's fashion.'
'So if you had to sum up boo's approach to fashion, what would you say?' asked Lauren.
'Well, Lauren, I'd say that we're attempting a symbiosis of designer and performance apparel. In the new millennium consumers are going to be looking for clothes that perform whether on the slopes or on the street.' Skidmore took his fashion very seriously.
Momentarily nonplussed, Lauren persevered. 'What about this geek chic image? Are you geeks?'
'Not entirely,' said Skidmore. 'We even have a boo skiing team.' And he told Lauren about an exciting trip we had made a few months ago with Charlotte and Edward to visit the suppliers, North Face. Their head office was near Aspen, Colorado, in the middle of the Rockies. So we flew in from New York a day early, to get some skiing on the slopes at Vail before our meeting. Lauren, it turned out, was a keen skier too.
'We work hard, but we play hard,' said Skidmore, topping up Lauren's glass with wine.
'boo's more than just a business,' I explained. 'It's a way of life too. People want to feel like they're helping to build something. They also get to do things they've never done before. It's a steep learning curve.'
'The start-up culture, huh?' Lauren said, a little dubiously. 'Do you have people sleeping in the office?'
'We prefer it if they go home,' I said, 'but yes, sometimes.'
Skidmore nodded. 'boo is like a cult. Just look at him,' he said, gesturing at Paul Kanareck. 'Two months ago, he was a banker. Now he's like Ernst's . . . secretary.'
'Executive assistant,' Paul pointed out. 'I wanted to be his secretary, but my legs weren't good enough.'
Lauren grinned. More than anything, she was amazed by the sheer number of people we managed to cram into our office, and the wide variety of nationalities working side by side.
'There must be a lot of arguments,' Lauren said.
'They're too busy for that,' I replied. 'When we're as big as Amazon, then people can start arguing.'
The food finally arrived, on Limoges china plates, with chopsticks. While the others shared an assortment of exotic-looking sashimi and sushi rolls, I got a shitake mushroom salad and beef 'toban' yaki.
'What do you think?' Robin asked, bringing a bottle of wine and joining us at the table.
'It's fantastic,' I mumbled with a full mouth.
Robin, an accomplished schmoozer, chatted with us for a while about the hard life of a restaurant manager.
'Oh, Gabby, Gabby,' he said, as a beautiful girl passed our table. 'Come and meet the boo people.' He introduced us to Gabby Harris, a hot new designer famous for her sweaters and crystal T-shirts.
By the end of the evening, we were all in the mood to go out.
'Where should we go?' I asked.
'Let's go to Momo,' said Robin's friend Martina, who worked in the Met Bar.
Momo, near Piccadilly, was a Moroccan restaurant with a basement bar that had become one of the most popular places in town after Madonna held a party there. The downstairs area, with its sofas and large cushions, was a great place to drink, dance or just take it easy.
'This is a boo night out,' I said, ordering several rounds of vodka and grapefruit juice. 'So we have to drink the boo cocktail.' We spent the next three hours dancing to Moroccan music and shouting to each other about fashion. When the bar closed, at around 3 a.m., we were all having trouble standing up.
I wasn't too surprised the next day when Paul came up to my desk and said that Lauren had rung to say that she had a massive headache and was feeling too ill to make the interview. I had only just managed to get to the office myself. But the main thing was that a cool company had given her a cool time.
